The South Australian Government has launched a new soil management program aimed at increasing agricultural production in the state by $800 million a year.

The program will include three trial sites in the state's South East, Murray-Mallee and Eyre Peninsula.

The program's manager, Paul Dalby, says while previously soil science has focussed on the top 10 centimetres of soil, this project will look deeper.

"We believe that if we can modify sandy soils; and that could be through the addition of organic matter or nutrients or maybe even gypsum that we can encourage roots to grow down much deeper, they explore more of the soil and take up more of the nutrients and also take up more water, particularly at the end of the season."

Mr Dalby says the first aim of the project will be to see if these types of modifications to the subsoil can double the yields farmers are getting on sandy soils.

"We want to take a systematic, scientific approach to determine if we can consistently double yields on sandy and sodic soils."

The project, called New Horizons, will combine previous academic work with trial results to see what works best in different parts of SA.

Once there are solid results, Mallee Sustainable Farming and other extension agriculture groups will be used to spread the information.

State Agriculture Minister Gail Gago says it'll provide a good example of what farmers can do on their own properties.

"The research will hopefully be able to demonstrate what farmers can do to improve the productivity of their farms and should easily be able to demonstrate what practices they need to adopt to be able to improve productivity."